Ornate Burrowing Frog

Fascinating facts about the Ornate Burrowing Frog

• At just 50 mm long, the ornate burrowing frog is about the length of a small matchbox, making it one of the tiniest ground frogs in Australia.
• Its genome is the smallest ever recorded for a frog, smaller than many bird genomes, allowing the cells to be tiny and the tadpoles to complete metamorphosis in only eleven days, just fast enough to escape drying desert ponds.
• When a heavy spring rain hits, a single female can lay up to 1,600 eggs in a dome-shaped foam that soon collapses into a floating film, turning a temporary puddle into a bustling nursery overnight.
• The tadpoles can grow to 50 mm, but most only reach about 36 mm before they leave the water, with dusky grey-brown backs and silver and/or gold flecks.
• Males announce the rain-filled pools with a short, nasal "unk" that echoes slowly across still water, a call so minimal it helps researchers tell this frog apart from its look-alike cousins.

At a glance

About the Ornate Burrowing Frog

The ornate burrowing frog, Platyplectrum ornatum, is a diminutive ground dweller that never exceeds 50 mm in length. Its skin shifts through a palette of greys, browns and yellows, each individual bearing a unique mosaic of dorsal markings, often a butterfly-shaped patch behind the eyes and a carpet of red-tipped warts. Skin folds crowd the head, while the limbs are barred with darker speckles; toes show a hint of webbing, but the fingers remain unwebbed. This modest amphibian carries the smallest known genome of any frog, a genetic economy that yields tiny cells and fuels an astonishingly rapid metamorphosis. In the desert ponds where it breeds, the water evaporates in days, so tadpoles can transform into froglets in just eleven days after fertilisation, sprinting out of shrinking pools before they vanish. Occupying a swath from western Sydney to Cape York, the species skirts the Great Dividing Range and reaches into Western Australia, thriving in wet sclerophyll forests along the coast and in arid woodlands inland. True to its name, it burrows feet-first, using enlarged tubercles on its feet to scrape soil. After heavy spring or summer rains, the males emerge to float on still waters, dams, puddles, flooded grasslands, and emit a short, nasal "unk" that drifts slowly across the surface. Up to 1 600 eggs are laid in a delicate foam that collapses into a floating film, and the resulting tadpoles, though capable of reaching 50 mm, usually stop at about 36 mm, their dusky dorsum flecked with silver or gold.

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